TL;DR: Adolescence is one of the most demanding periods of growth your body will ever go through. You need enough food, enough nutrients, and enough rest to support the work—and your body doesn't need to look like anyone else's while it's doing it.

What Are We Actually Feeding Our Toddlers? TL;DR: A new study of nearly 2,800 toddler foods found that 81% are ultra-processed, and 49% don't meet WHO nutrient standards for sugar, sodium, fat, or energy density. The toddler aisle hasn't done the nutritional thinking for you — here's what to actually look forIf you have ever stood in the toddler food aisle of a grocery store and assumed that the foods sitting there had to meet some kind of special nutritional standard, you wo

The new dietary guidelines have removed fortified infant cereal as a complementary food, quietly removing one of the few reliably accessible tools parents had for meeting one of the hardest nutritional targets in infancy: adequate iron.

The AAP's updated report on Iron deficiency is explicit about this: iron deficiency and iron deficiency anemia are associated with impaired neurocognitive development, meaning the stakes aren't just about energy levels or growth charts, they're about the brain development happening during one of the most critical windows of a child's life. The period when iron needs are highest, starting around 6 months overlaps almost exactly with the period of most rapid brain development i